Issue 48: A Mini-Tutorial on Program Innovation
How to go beyond compliance through human rights program design and partnerships.
Now you have an idea of some of the skills you may need to do human rights work effectively within a company, from developing strategy to establishing governance, assigning responsibility, and influencing without formal authority. These skills are essential, but they are only part of the picture.
Equally important is the ability to embrace new challenges and design solutions that make sense for your organization. Sometimes, adopting an existing turnkey solution works well. Other times, you need to build programs from the ground up. The ability to navigate this balance—leveraging what already exists while innovating to fill gaps—is what distinguishes effective human rights officers.
My journey with program design began long before working in corporate human rights. As a teenager volunteering with a community youth group in my hometown, I helped create multimedia content to raise awareness about voting rights and amplify youth voices. My thought process was simple: what is missing, what do we need, and how can we build something relevant and impactful for the target audience? I applied the same approach in the Peace Corps, where I secured a small grant to teach local youth basic technology skills, from understanding what a computer is to navigating the internet and setting up email accounts to stay connected. None of the students had ever used a computer before.
Over time, the work has become more complex. While at the State Department, I became a certified Grant Officer Representative, developing public solicitations to invite program proposals from external organizations, managing them on a quarterly basis, and evaluating their effectiveness. This process required far more preparation and engagement, including traveling to communities abroad to understand local needs firsthand.
After years in human rights and social compliance, one of the aspects I love most is tackling amorphous problems and designing programs that address complex business and social challenges. This skill has allowed me to experiment across companies, industries, audiences, and domains. For example, I have built both a multi-million-dollar grant-making program and a global employee training program that reached over half a million people worldwide. These programs were very different, yet both were fueled by the same curiosity and drive to leverage business strengths into innovation and first-mover recognition.
In this article, I want to share practical lessons, best practices, and critical questions for in-house practitioners tasked with designing programs that deliver tangible impact. I draw on my experiences at The Walt Disney Company (2011–2016), where I developed the Supply Chain Investment Program, and at Marriott International (2016–2019), where I led the company’s first mandated global forced labor employee training program.
I will outline six recurring considerations that guide my approach to program innovation. These experiences have taught me that meaningful human rights work requires creativity, strategic thinking, and a relentless focus on people and outcomes—skills you can carry with you everywhere.
Two Tools I Use: Design Thinking and SWOT
If you want a more structured way of thinking through program design, I find these two complementary tools really useful: Design Thinking and SWOT analysis.
Together, they provide a structured yet flexible approach for understanding problems, generating innovative solutions, and aligning programs with both human and business needs.
1. Design Thinking
Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to problem-solving that emphasizes understanding the people you are designing for, defining the right problem, brainstorming creative solutions, prototyping, and iterating based on feedback. It is particularly effective for complex or “messy” challenges where there is no obvious solution.
How to use it for human rights programs:
Empathize: Engage directly with workers, suppliers, employees, and other stakeholders to understand their experiences, pain points, and needs. Observation, interviews, and surveys help uncover insights that might not be obvious from reports or policies.
Define the problem: Synthesize insights to identify the core human rights challenges. Frame the problem in a way that connects worker needs with business priorities.
Ideate: Brainstorm multiple solutions without judgment. Encourage innovative ideas that leverage company strengths, fill gaps in current programs, and improve real-world outcomes for workers.
Prototype: Pilot programs or initiatives to test assumptions and learn quickly. Examples could be a small-scale employee training program, a supplier incentive program, or a local grievance mechanism. Start small, then scale.
Test and iterate: Gather feedback from users and stakeholders, measure impact, and refine the program before scaling. This iterative approach reduces risk and improves effectiveness.
Why it works:
Design Thinking ensures that programs are not just compliant but human-centered, practical, and impactful. It encourages creativity while keeping workers and communities at the heart of every decision.
Some Resources:
2. SWOT Analysis
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It is a strategic tool used to analyze internal capabilities and external factors before designing a program or making a decision. I use this framework all the time so often that I do it mentally for many things. For human rights programs, SWOT helps ensure solutions are feasible, sustainable, and aligned with business goals.
How to use it for human rights programs:
Strengths: Identify internal capabilities, resources, or relationships you can leverage. Examples include existing partnerships with NGOs, experienced teams, or technology platforms for grievance mechanisms, worker voice, and monitoring and reporting.
Weaknesses: Recognize gaps or limitations in your current human rights program. These could be lack of training, limited regional knowledge, or siloed functions that hinder collaboration.
Opportunities: Look for external possibilities to enhance impact, such as partnerships, funding opportunities, first-mover advantages, or industry-wide collaboration.
Threats: Anticipate risks that could undermine your program, including regulatory changes, political instability, supplier resistance, or reputational challenges.
Why it works:
SWOT analysis provides a strategic lens to complement Design Thinking. While Design Thinking focuses on human-centered creativity, SWOT ensures your solutions are realistic, address gaps, and navigate risks. Together, they help design programs that are innovative, actionable, and aligned with business priorities.
Some Resources:
Youtube: How to do a SWOT Analysis (3 minutes)
Asana: SWOT Analysis
3. When Combined
When I use Design Thinking and SWOT together, the work becomes both human-centered and strategic.
Many of you are likely already doing elements of this without labeling it as such. If you are speaking with workers to understand their realities before drafting a policy, you are practicing design thinking. If you are assessing what your company does well, where it struggles, and what risks or opportunities exist before launching a program, you are applying SWOT.
Design Thinking keeps the focus on people. It pushes you to understand what workers and stakeholders truly need and prevents programs from becoming abstract or compliance-driven.
SWOT grounds that insight in organizational reality. It ensures the program leverages strengths, addresses weaknesses, captures real opportunities, and anticipates risks. For example, developing a program that focuses on a country or region where your business has zero operations or influence will not speak to the company’s strengths not be relevant.
Together, these approaches help you move from good intentions to well-designed programs that are both impactful and strategically sound, improving outcomes for workers while strengthening the company’s long-term credibility and social license to operate.
Six Steps to Designing a Business-Aligned Human Rights Program
Across the decades of building, adapting, and implementing social impact programs, particularly focused on improving the lives of people and human rights, I have found that establishing an effective human rights program, whether you’re building a new program, expanding a signature program, or scaling an existing partnership, often follows a set of recurring steps. Regardless of the industry, geography, or regulatory pressure, the fundamentals remain similar: programs work best when they are grounded in the realities of the business while remaining centered on the people whose rights may be affected.
The six steps outlined here are not the only way to build a human rights program. Every company’s structure, risk profile, and operating environment will shape how the work ultimately unfolds. Rather, these steps offer a practical starting point—a set of guiding actions that can help practitioners move from intention to implementation.
Used together, they can help translate human rights principles into operational practice, ensuring that human rights considerations are embedded into decision-making, risk management, and everyday business operations.
1. Identify the Business Need
Every human rights program should be rooted in a clear business objective. Aligning human rights work with business priorities ensures senior buy-in, resourcing, and the ability to act strategically. The more business priorities you can align your program idea to, the better.
Critical Questions:
What is the problem we’ve trying to solve?
What specific business risk or opportunity does this program address? (e.g., forced labor, supply chain disruption, brand reputation, regulatory compliance)
How does addressing this human rights issue create value for the company and its stakeholders?
What are the expected business outcomes alongside social outcomes?
Which departments, teams, or executives will benefit from this program’s insights or results?
SWOT Integration:
Strengths: What existing programs, relationships, or resources can support this business-aligned initiative?
Weaknesses: Where are gaps in internal capability, data, or expertise?
Opportunities: Can this program differentiate the company in the market or build first-mover advantage?
Threats: What business or regulatory risks exist if the program fails or is delayed?
My experience: Supply Chain Investment Program at Disney
At Disney, one of the biggest challenges for the responsible sourcing function was scale. The company had an enormous first-tier supplier base, and the volume of social audits required to monitor compliance was relentless, manual, and costly. While audits helped identify risks, they were largely reactive, revealing problems after they occurred and offering limited ability to improve conditions sustainably.
This highlighted a clear business need. Disney needed an approach that could move beyond compliance and the first tier of suppliers, while still helping the company manage risk and strengthen working conditions across a vast global supply chain.
To address this, we developed a new program called the Supply Chain Investment Program (SCIP) in 2011 that leveraged Disney’s charitable giving mechanism but was flexible enough to partner with social enterprises and global organizations. The SCIP provided seed funding to programs in key sourcing hubs where Disney’s consumer products were manufactured. These partnerships helped licensees, suppliers, and workers strengthen labor practices, improve workplace conditions, and build capacity in a more proactive and scalable way.